Welcome to BLAST Issue 5

February 2023

AUCTIONS

Day-glo paintings dazzle

**Duncan McCormick (b.1977)**
`Rose Bay Lovers, 2021. Courtesy of Sotheby’s`

A 45-year-old Shropshire born figurative painter who began using bold, day-glo style colours to cheer himself up during lockdown, is experiencing a post pandemic boom. “It seems people from Asia to America have discovered him on Instagram, and are competing for his art at auction,” says Duncan McCormick’s dealer, Jonathan Dodd of the Waterhouse & Dodd gallery in London and New York. Prices at the gallery for his 5x4 foot colour saturated landscapes and interiors range between £30,000 and £55,000, he says, but they have been making twice as much at auction. The artist’s first work at auction, ‘Jane’s Beach’, 2021, appeared at Phillips in London last December with a £10,000 estimate and sold for an astonishing £119,700. The second, Rose Bay Lovers, 2021, appeared in an online sale at Sotheby’s in January with an £8,000 estimate and sold for an even more astonishing £151,200. “We’ve only been working with him for about six months,” says Dodd “but as these results might encourage our buyers to resell their works at auction, we have introduced a contract in which they must agree not to resell for three years.” Next round for McCormick is on March 2nd when Sotheby’s offers a typical day-glo coloured landscape painted in 2020 with a £10,000–£15,000 estimate. Then the next day Phillips has his Red Tree House, also 2020 and, as with all his auction sales so far, acquired direct from the artist with a £10,000–£15,000 estimate. Any guesses what they will sell for?

British CoBrA artist catches up with European counterparts

Late last December a long overdue tip of the hat went to Stephen Gilbert (1910-2007), one of the few British artists, along with William Gear, associated with the mid-century avant-garde European CoBrA group. But while the European members of the group - Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky and Karel Appel (his estate now represented by contemporary dealer, Max Hetzler) have all achieved six and seven figure prices at auction, Gilbert had never sold for more than £16,800... until an untitled painting of strange, masked and winged creatures appeared at Bruun Rasmussen in Copenhagen, now part of the Bonhams group, quadrupling estimates to sell for £72,400.

Dated 1948, and shown that year at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris, where the Danish artist, Asger Jorn spotted his work and invited him to join CoBrA, it must be considered as museum-worthy as any internationally aware avant-garde work by a British artist of that period, so may still be undervalued.

`Stephen Gilbert (1910-2007)`
`Untitled, 1948. Image Courtesy Bonhams`

EXHIBITIONS

Washington embraces British photography

A collection of forty-five photographs of strike torn, racially conflicted and inflation hit Britain in the 1970’s and 1980’s by the likes of Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Paul Graham, Vanley Burke and Colin Jones, which cross the boundaries between art and documentation, has been acquired by The National Gallery of Art in Washington and is currently on display there in an exhibition titled This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. The museum is reluctant to disclose costs, but an educated guess would be around 1 million pounds which is not a great deal in the scheme of things. But a major American museum giving exposure to a rather obscure area of British photography (conceptual/documentary and definitely anti-glamour) is a boost for the genre. The collection took four years to assemble, says curator, Kara Felt, acquiring works from British art and photography dealers such as James Hyman (whose Centre for British Photography recently opened), Michael Hoppen, Augusta Edwards, Hales, Rocket and The Photographers’ Gallery.

**Vanley Burke (b.1951)**
`Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park, 1970 . Printed 2022. gelatin silver print. Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund`

This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s is open at The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC until 11 June 2023.

Women’s History Month 2023 | Undervalued British female abstract artists exposed

The exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery expands the perimeters of Abstract Expressionism beyond the all-male American version into a global, female phenomenon as well. It’s a fascinating revelation encompassing artists from Asia and the Middle East that few art history students will have been made aware of. The artists loaned by the Sharjah based Barjeel Art Foundation will, however, be familiar to auction goers who keep an eye on London’s modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sales. British art also has a healthy representation with works by Gillian Ayres, Sandra Blow, Lilian Holt, Margaret Mellis, and Elsa Vaudrey. Of these, Vaudrey, a Scot who exhibited with Redfern Gallery, and Holt (1898-1983), who was married to David Bomberg, are perhaps the least recognised of the group. Holt’s work is yet to reach £2,000 at auction, whilst Vaudrey has never made enough to qualify for inclusion on the Artnet database. A group of four drawings and paintings by Vaudrey sold at Dreweatts in 2020 for just £300. If the Whitechapel exhibition alerts would-be collectors to artists who have been under recognised in the past and therefore undervalued, as were Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner in America before they hit seven figures, then these British women must be worth looking into further.

Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 is a part of Women’s History Month in East London.

`Upper right: Elsa Vaudrey, Untitled, 1959 Gouache on board 74 x 99 cm Private Collection Lower right: Elsa Vaudrey, Night Flight, 1960 Gouache on board 76 x 100.8 cm Private Collection. On the upper and lower left: two works by the Portuguese artist, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, whose work can fetch over £1 million.`

British Rose blooms in Paris

Paris may be challenging London’s pre-eminence in the European art market, but it is also promoting neglected areas of British modern art history in Europe. In the museum sector next month, the Museé Marmottan Monet presents a very European perspective on Neo-Romanticism from 3 March without a glimpse of the British artists we associate with the term – John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Keith Vaughan etc., But one of the lead images for the show, L’Ensemble, is a major work by British artist, Sir Francis Rose (1909-1979), a close friend of Gertrude Stein who fetches negligible amounts at auction and whose estate is managed by London dealer, Jane England.

**Sir Francis Rose (1909-1979)**
`L’Ensemble, 1938 . (left to right: Madame Wellington Koo, Emmy Sommermann, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Natalie Barney, Diana Varé, Serge Lifar, George Maratier, Francis Rose, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchew, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Louis Bromfield, Tyrone Power, Virgil Thomson, Francis Picabia et Billy Mayor) . Image Courtesy England & Co, © Estate of Sir Francis Rose/photograph`

British female surrealists included in major Paris show

**Marion Adnams (1898 - 1995),**
`Emperor Moths-Thunder, 1963, huile sur toile, RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women), © DR, photo © Stéphane Pons`

Meanwhile at the Musée de Montmartre from 31 March a survey of female surrealists aims to rectify the gender balance and gives some prominence to the British contingent of female surrealists led by the now familiar figure of Leonora Carrington but followed by a host of overlooked artists including Marion Adnams, Diana Brinton-Lee, Grace Pailthorpe, Edith Rimmington, Mary Wykeham, and, as signalled in the last issue of BLAST, Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun.

Surréalisme au Féminin? is held at Musée de Montmartre, 31 March – 10 September 2023

Artist spotlight: Richard Smith

**Richard Smith (1931-2016)**
`Passerby, 1969. Image Courtesy Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert`

Two exhibitions can currently be seen in London devoted to The British artist, Richard Smith, who died in 2016. One is a survey (1965-2009) at Flowers Gallery which represented the artist during the last 20 years of his life. The other is at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert which took over management of Smith’s estate after he died and is focussed on the distinctive shaped canvases he made in the late sixties and early seventies. Both have benefitted from the publication of a substantial new book on Smith by Thames & Hudson in association with The Estate of Francis Bacon with essays by the former Tate curator, Chris Stephens and the art historian, David Alan Mellor who agree that Smith was a leading light in his youth, moving from pop to hard edge abstraction and colour field painting, becoming a master of the shaped, 3D canvas. But although he was granted a retrospective by the Tate aged just 43 in 1975, he was out of step with new wave conceptual practice and slipped out of the limelight. The market background to the latest developments is that by the time Flowers began working with Smith in mid 1990s his large paintings might fetch about £12,000, less than equivalent abstracts by John Hoyland or Gillian Ayres and considerably less than Sean Scully or Bridget Riley. When he died, his auction record of just £27,600 had stood for nearly ten years.

What the book does not address is the market swing that took place after his death. At auction, that 10-year-old record was demolished in 2017 when a 1960s shaped canvas, Tip Top, sold for a record £131,250. Word had got out that Holland-Hibbert was gunning for the artist’s estate, and taking his work to the premier art fair, Art Basel with six figure price tags. Holland-Hibbert was also active in buying at auction. In January 2020, for instance, Christie’s offered a 7-ft cumulous type abstract, Place 1, 1960, that had belonged to the influential collector, EJ Power, that was chased over the £40,000 estimate by Austin /Desmond Fine Art before selling to Holland-Hibbert for £125,000.

While there may be some rivalry between the two galleries, both are agreed on where Smiths prices should be. At his show, Matthew Flowers has priced works on paper from £8,000 to £20,000 and paintings from £50,000 to £200,000. The shaped canvases at Holland-Hibbert range from £100,000 to £150,000, though he has sold earlier, flat canvases from the 60s for as much as £225,000.

ART FAIR NEWS

Fair favourites to follow

**Patrick Goddard (b.1984)**
`High Street, 2022 Acrylic, aluminium, steel, resin, wood, fibre board, cardboard, snail shells, additive printing, acrylic paint, canvas. 123 x 100 x 32 cm`

Contemporary British artists going down a storm at art fairs abroad include Patrick Goddard whose installation, Whoopsie’s Dream, was shown at Paris+ last October when it was snapped up by the famous Miami collectors, Don and Mera Rubell. The work on London gallery, Seventeen’s stand, comprises a 20 minute film of a speaking dog having a nightmare (17,000 Euros) and several painted wall dioramas of 1960s village life, populated by snails (10,000 Euros each). Where the Rubells go, many others follow.

Snap up: sculptures by Abdulrazaq Awofeso

**Abdulrazaq Awofeso (b.1978)**
`Joshie, 2022. Image Courtesy Ed Cross Fine Art`

London dealer, Ed Cross, experienced a welcome demand at the 1-54 African art fair in Marrakech (9-12 Feb) for the wood figure sculptures by Birmingham/UK based artist Abdulrazaq Awofeso (b 1978). Two works were sold within hours of the opening to an Austrian collector for £2,000–£8,000 each, and, after a visit from by Alicia Knock, African Art curator from Pompidou Centre with a delegation, another three were sold. The artist’s next major outing will be at the non-selling South London Gallery in July, though I’m sure all offers will be considered.

Collectors love: Simon Roberts’ sheathed sculpture photographs

*Simon Roberts, Shrouded Statue #1 (Theseus and the Minotaur by Antonio Canova), 2021*
`Available as limited edition pigment prints 24 x 32 inches Edition of 7 + 2 AP and 44 x 58 inches Edition of 4 + 1 AP`

At the Swiss fair, Art Genève in late January, Galerie Heinzer Reszler reported numerous sales of photographic art works by British artist Simon Roberts where they were priced at £3,700 each. Taken from the series Beneath the Pilgrim Moon, these were not Roberts’ usual landscape subjects, but photographs of shrouded funerary and portrait sculptures in the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Sculpture Galleries in the V&A Museum. When he heard the galleries were being closed for refurbishment in November 2020, Roberts went to look and found the sculptures wrapped in plastic for protection and saw them as a metaphor for the isolation of lockdown. The works were shown first at Flowers Gallery in London, but still clearly resonate with collectors abroad.

VITAL STATISTICS

Doubling up: British art ‘most improved’ at auction in 2022

ArtTactic’s first survey on the modern and contemporary print market published this month shows that, after a record sales year British artists returned the most improved auction figures in 2022 outperforming all the competing nations by doubling turnover from $9 million in 2021 to $18 million. The top sellers were, somewhat predictably, David Hockney with $70 million (+96.4%); Banksy with $5.3 million (+342%), and Damien Hirst with $2.4 million (+107.7%). Best-selling British female print maker was Bridget Riley with just over $1 million of sales.

Engine secrets: The top searched-for British artists on Artnet

In another number crunch, Artnet totted up who were the most researched artists on its auction database and the UK came up with a respectable 30 out of the top 300. The majority were living artists, led again by Hockney (no5), Hirst (8) and Banksy (13). Further down we have Henry Moore, Freud, Hepworth, Emin and Gormley, above Lowry, and a clutch of younger women, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Jones and Caroline Walker making a strong showing in the lower order. Of course, the ratings are not an objective order of merit but one dictated purely by success and potential in the auction market. What other ratings system would place Banksy (13) above Turner (287)?

Colin Gleadell is the art market columnist for The Daily Telegraph and a regular contributor to Artnet News, Art Monthly, and Artsy. Prior to The Telegraph, he worked for the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art as a researcher, the Crane Kalman Gallery as a gallery manager, and Bonhams auctioneers as Head of Modern Pictures. He worked for ten years (1986 – 1997) as the features editor of Galleries Magazine, whilst also contributing to leading art market publications such as Art & Auction and Art News where he was the London correspondent of the Artnewsletter. He Introduced Sister Wendy Beckett to the BBC for whom he worked as a consultant on market programmes such as the Relative Values series (1991). He also worked as an art market consultant for Channel 4 News.

Gleadell was on the original advisory committee for the 20th Century British Art Fair in 1988, where he has served ever since as it changed its name to the 20/21 British Art Fair, and now British Art Fair.

BLAST #5